The Internet and multimedia applications are becoming increasingly popular across the world, and there exists a significant momentum for industry to build and deploy efficient Internet-based contact centers. In general, a contact center (also known as a call center or customer interaction center) is a centralized office, which operates as part of an organization's customer relationship management (CRM). For example, the contact center can receive and transmit large volume of requests via various communication channels (e.g., telephone, fax, live chat, e-mail, letter, and the like.) The contact center can further administer incoming product support or information inquiries from clients or users, for example. Likewise, outgoing calls for telemarketing, client issues, product services, and the like can also be administered by the contact center.
Accordingly, a contact center represents a central point for an organization from which customer contacts can be managed. The contact center can consist of a number of human agents, wherein each agent is assigned to a telecommunication device (e.g., a phone or a computer for conducting email or Internet chat sessions)—which is connected to a central switch. Such devices enable agents to provide sales, customer service, or technical support to existing customers or prospects. The contact center can be independently operated or networked with additional centers, and is often linked to a corporate computer network. Voice and data pathways into such centers can further be linked through technologies such as computer telephony integration (CTI).
To this end, contact centers enable routing of company information to customers, while tracking their information for accumulation of marketing data. Moreover, various enterprises employ contact centers for servicing internal functions. Such can include help desks, retail financial support, sales support, and the like. In general, contact centers can establish “preferred” channels of contacts, for different types of inquiries. Such preferences can typically be based on costs associated with handling each type of contact. For example, for contacts such as product service inquiries that typically do not generate revenue, web based support portal(s) can be designated as the preferred channel. Likewise, for contacts related to purchase of products, the preferred channel can be a live human contact center agent via voice—which enables an opportunity to “up sell” the caller with more profitable products/services. Such designations of preferred channels do not necessarily indicate that specific types of service are only available on these specific channels. Rather, the designations merely represent that the businesses have established preferences based on balancing costs and revenues, with respect to pairing the services with contact designations.
Contact centers that respond to incoming contacts are typically referred to as “inbound contact centers”, and contact centers that engage in outgoing contacts are referred to as “outbound contact centers.” For example, in an outbound contact center contacts can occur to encourage sales of a product, provide technical support or supply billing information, survey consumer preferences, and the like. In both cases of inbound and outbound, a contact center operation can include a switch system that connects callers to agents.
In an inbound contact center, such switches route incoming callers to a particular agent in a contact center—or alternatively—if multiple contact centers are deployed, to a particular contact center for further routing. Likewise, in an outbound contact center that employs telephone devices, dialers are typically employed in addition to a switch system. The dialer can automatically dial a phone number from a list of phone numbers, and further determine whether a live person has actually been reached (as opposed to reaching an answering machine). Subsequently, and when the dialer obtains a live caller, the switch system routes the caller to a particular agent in the contact center.
To this end, routing technologies have been developed to optimize caller experience. For example, a telephone system can equalize caller waiting times across multiple telephone switches, regardless of general variations in performance that can exist among those switches.
Typically, the contact center can set up a queue of incoming callers and preferentially route longest-waiting callers to agents that become available periodically. Such pattern of routing contacts to either the first available agent (or the longest-waiting agent) is referred to as “round-robin” contact routing. In general, attempts have been made to improve upon such standards.